Background: Tribe Orchideae dominates the orchid flora of the temperate Northern Hemisphere but its representatives in East Asia had been subject to less intensive phylogenetic study than those in Eurasia and North America. Although this situation was improved recently by the molecular phylogenetic study of Jin et al., comparatively few species were analyzed from the species-rich and taxonomically controversial East Asian Amitostigma alliance. Here, we present a framework nrITS tree of 235 accessions of Orchideae...

Living fossils are lineages that have retained plesiomorphic traits through long time periods. It is expected that such lineages have both originated and diversified long ago. Such expectations have recently been challenged in some textbook examples of living fossils, notably in extant cycads and coelacanths. Using a phylogenetic approach, we tested the patterns of the origin and diversification of liphistiid spiders, a clade of spiders considered to be living fossils due to their retention of...

Background: Antarctic notothenioids are an impressive adaptive radiation. While they share recent common ancestry with several species-depauperate lineages that exhibit a relictual distribution in areas peripheral to the Southern Ocean, an understanding of their evolutionary origins and biogeographic history is limited as the sister lineage of notothenioids remains unidentified. The phylogenetic placement of notothenioids among major lineages of perciform fishes, which include sculpins, rockfishes, sticklebacks, eelpouts, scorpionfishes, perches, groupers and soapfishes, remains unresolved. We investigate...